Visualization

 

 

"Often, it is seen that the chances of retrogression into the older moods and instincts are greater in those who try to control the mind than those who give a long rope to it. A satisfied enemy is less likely to offer an attack than the dissatisfied one."
(Sri Swami Krishnananda)

 

A concept that always seems to bother seekers at one time or another is that of visualization.  In meditation practice you are often if not always asked to visualize a variety of things and so, often the question is asked whether this visualization is really any different than imagination.  In a way it is.  With imagination you are sort of led around and you know there is a certain quality of unreality with what you are imagining (if you step back and examine it).  With visualization you are more of a director.  You deliberately choose your inner visual image.

 

Still, the question remains whether there is a qualitative difference between what is imagined and what is visualized.  We recognize the ingredient of unreality in our imagination.  The look and feel of our imagination is not that much different than our visualizations.  Both contain images concocted or created from our world, albeit sometimes in very strange and convoluted arrangements.  So why then in Yoga do we suggest this visualization and attribute so much importance to its practice?

 

Let's step back a little.  Everything… every possible image that you can visualize or imagine has a core existence in the phenomenal world.  Test it.  Try imagining or visualizing something so way out foreign, absurd, or strange – and you can – but when you disassemble the image you'll find the parts have their roots in the world that is known to you.  The one-eyed green Martian, or whatever, consists of "parts" – hands of some kind, eyes, ears, a body, a color and so on, each of which has a root of existence inside of your world.  Sure, so we bend things a little – we'll make him green, and one-eyed and short, which is strange and odd and convoluted, but the parts that make him up are from roots of phenomena you have come into contact with via your senses at some earlier point.

 

This means that everything… everything you see is imagination, which is really "image in action".  When you imagine an elephant and then imagine a Martian, the technical working of the science behind the act of imagination and visualization of both is exactly the same.

 

But then something more complex happens; we use a higher faculty called discrimination to attribute some "reality" factor to what we imagine or visualize.  Furthermore, depending upon what "reality factor" we attribute to our inner images, we are accordingly moved affectively.  Our inner pictures are mere pictures. It is our discrimination and attribution that affects how we experience the picture (other than "seeing" it).  So it is not our visualization that is as important as our discriminative faculty. 

 

But there is more:  As a general rule we react to certain pictures in certain ways.  We feel differently about a violent scene than we do about a landscape of beauty.  We "feel" about everything we see.  We can say that we have scary pictures and cool pictures and an infinite range in-between.

 

Yoga taps into this "pictures-make-us-feel" idea by means of visualization.  Yoga visualizations are not about car crashes or violence (that I know of), but are "cool pictures" that create within you those feelings which Yoga has identified as conducive to development.  In a Tantric sense, you "make love", meaning Divine Love, via visualizations.  Love is said to be your original and primal state before you took the images of your world as "real" and separate from your Being.  Remember that?  Before you made One into two; into me and not-me.

 

Yoga states: "As you think, so you become".  So Yoga visualizations are designed as a vehicle to move you nearer to your Self by using images with feelings conducive to realizing your own Being. By doing so, visualizations can create within you a feeling of Love rather than something else less conducive if given free reign.

 

The implication of the fact that you tend to feel according to what you think is huge.  Watch what you think.  If it leads you away from your Self and the feeling of Love then change your thinking. That will change your feeling.  You can, you know. Your thoughts come from your mind and your mind is your tool that you own and control, or should.  So it is one of the battles in life - the control of your mind. It becomes a Holy War where yoga is the armor and visualization is the weapon or shield.

 

From the Mundaka Upanishad (v.3,4), these lines: 

 

"Take the Upanishad as the bow, the great weapon, and place upon it the arrow sharpened by meditation. Then, having drawn it back with a mind directed to the thought of Brahman, strike that mark, O my good friend—that which is the Imperishable. Om is the bow; the atman is the arrow; Brahman is said to be the mark. It is to be struck by an undistracted mind. Then the atman becomes one with Brahman, as the arrow with the target."

 

Don't only watch your mind, my Friends. Tell it what to watch.

 

Namaste

 

 

More Selected Writings

 

 

Sri Humananda &copy
Dwapara 310 (2010)